Do Men have the right to a "financial abortion"

I was reading this blog article in HuffyPost from about 2 years ago. The author brings up a point where she says:

"While pro-choice legislation makes the rights of the mother clear, at what point is a father able to say,'I do not want this child'? Whether pro-life or pro-choice, we should all be able to agree that the quality of life is just as important as life itself, and when faced with the pivotal decision of whether or not to continue a pregnancy, both parents must be included in the dialogue. If not, ultimately, it is the child who suffers."

She goes on and provides data of situations of children growing in fatherless homes

• 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes • 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes • 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes • 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes• 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes • 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes• 70% of youths in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes.• 85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes.

So undoubtedly the right for a woman to choose is obviously non negotiable. If a woman decides based on her situation that she does not want a child because of her reasoning, she has the right to abort her pregnancy without the approval of anyone other than herself. But the does the same rules apply for no one being able to endure a man to be financially responsible for a child that he did not want?

Another question to look at is if a man and woman have sex, they both know the consequences of a possible pregnancy. To which a woman can abort out of. But if a man and woman have sex, does the man have the right to have the woman to carry his child to term even the woman does not want to? (Talking about consensual sex, not rape or any of that stuff). Keep in mind that she knows the consequence of a possible pregnancy as well.

Keep in mind this is about a specific situation such as consensual sex not rape. Obviously matters of rape would nullify the discussion which I am aware of.

Replies to This Discussion

Unseen. Just to clarify . I feel you are looking at morality back to front. As yes we can define a moral system into existence without consideration of its purpose. But then it becomes little more than abstract nonsense." Morality, as generally understood, is a prescriptive code of behavior (dos and don'ts)" This may technically be true but without a purpose it is meaningless. It would be like describing a language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination and then creating a new language without any consideration that the purpose of a language is to convey meaning . And likewise a language that did not convey meaning would just be abstract nonsense .

"Who are the engineers?"- originally evolution "engineered" it. but humans have the intelligence and capacity to re-engineer it ourselves now and have been doing so for thousands of years.

The problem with viewing morality as social engineering is that morality is personal, not social. While thinkers try to impose a social purpose on it, if I were a woman who decides to abort an unintended accidental conception, I don't do it for social reasons, even though it may have social ramifications positive or negative. I do it for personal reasons such as, while I saw the male as a desirable sex partner I don't see him as a potential father, or I need to get my degree and establish some basic income before I take on the responsibilities of parenthood, or pregnancy would just be a major inconvenience. No social considerations at all.

We simply rarely think of the morality of our actions in terms of social engineering and it's the realm of personal morality that all but political moral decisions are made.

Aborting unwanted conceptions, given the ample evidence that one-parent families fail to raise children as well as intact two-person families avoids the waste of dealing with the damage bringing such conceptions to term will bring about.

Your comment about contraceptives is irrelevant considering that it's unlikely to change and thus must pretty much be taken as one of the givens in the situation. It certainly can't be presumed to be a solution. We're stuck with abortion in whatever form (surgically, morning after pill).

Moral vs. immoral is a false dichotomy. There is also "not morally relevant." If a woman terminates a pregnancy, it's a neither here nor there situation as far as I'm concerned. "Moral or immoral" is religious person talk.

"I AGREE with you that using abortion as first line defense against an unwanted pregnancy is immoral."

In this context it's usually a result of early religious training.

A few things once seen as moral failings are now treated medically. Two such are insanity (the devil no longer enters people) and alcoholism. Some religions (Presbyterian?) explain poverty as a result of sins committed early in life.

Many times in human history the first explanations for new and frightening phenomena were supernatural. They were some form of "God did it."

In time, reason found other causes (such as germ-caused diseases) and the early supernatural explanations lost their hold on people's minds.

The Republican Party's evangelicals still use supernatural explanations, such as their god is punishing America for taking prayer out of public schools.